Communion: A True Story (5 page)

On October 4. 1985, my wife, son, and I drove up to our cabin in the company of two close friends, Jacques Sandulescu and Annie Gottlieb.

We have known Jacques and Annie for about five years. The thing about them most immediately apparent is that he is as enormous as she is tiny. He weighs nearly 300 pounds, is a black belt in karate, d does a hundred push-ups at a session. She is also a black belt, but weighs perhaps 120 pounds. She is intellectual, he is physical. Both are writers. He came to the United States as a refugee from slave labor in the Soviet Union in the late forties. A Rumanian national, he had been forcibly transferred to the Donbas region to be worked to death in the mines there. His book,
Donbas
, tells of his long Journey of escape, and paints an accurate picture of him as a profoundly physical man. He would make a good witness, I thought, because of his steadfast sense of reality.

Annie Gottlieb is more an intellectual, the author of the recent
Do You Believe fn Magic:
The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation
(Times Books, 1987).

The night of October 4 was foggy in Ulster County. We had dinner at a local restaurant and arrived at the cabin at about nine in the evening. I turned on the pool heater so that the pool would be comfortable for use the next day (Saturday). Then I lit a fire in the wood stove: We were all sleepy, so sleepy that we went off to bed almost immediately.

Anne and I retired to our upstairs bedroom, Jacques and Annie went to the guest room and closed the door, and our son went to his corner bedroom beside theirs. He left his door open. From my bed, with the bedroom doors open, I could see out across the cathedral ceiling of the living room to a hexagonal window set in the peak of the roof.

Over the next hour, the fog grew thicker and thicker. When I turned out my reading fight I was enveloped in absolute blackness and total silence. The harvest moon had been full on September 29, and was now at about half. It rose at approximately ten-thirty, but was entirely invisible because of the cloud cover.

I do not remember what I had been reading that night, but it wasn't frightening, nor was dinner the sort of meal that would give rise to later unrest. We had not drunk more than one glass of wine and a drink each at the restaurant.

I slept dreamlessly for some period of time, perhaps as much as two or three hours. Then I was startled awake and saw, to my horror, that there was a distinct blue light being cast on the living-room ceiling.

I was frightened, because it wasn't possible for there to be any light there. Car lights from the road could not be cast on that ceiling. In early October our neighbor was away in Japan, and his house was not only dark but invisible through the forest between our places, which was still thickly leafed. The automatic porch light that had been persistently troublesome was now without bulbs. It could not have been a flashlight, because it was so uniform and so broad, and so distinctly blue. We have tried duplicating the light with a fluorescent camp lantern both on a clear night and on a similarly foggy one, but even an extremely powerful fluorescent light could not achieve the effect, let alone a small portable unit.

My mind inventoried the possibilities as I watched this blue light slowly creep up the ceiling, as if whatever was causing it were slowly moving down into the front yard from above. Finally I hit on what seemed to me a sensible solution: The chimney must be on fire and dropping sparks into the front yard. I had to do something about it at once.

Then I fell into a deep sleep! The last thought I remember before dropping off with my heart still hammering was that the roof was on fire. This was the first such wildly inappropriate reaction on that night, but it was not to be the last.

I do not know what time this all took place, but it was well after midnight.

Sometime after I fell back to sleep I was again awakened, this time by a loud report, as if a firecracker had popped in my face. My wife cried out and downstairs my son began shouting.

When I opened my eyes I was stunned to see that the entire house was surrounded by a glow that extended into the fog.

I thought to myself:
You damned fool, you fell asleep and now the fire's gotten worse.
I finally managed to get up. As I did so I said to Anne: "The roofs on fire. I'll get our son and wake up the others." I started downstairs.

I hadn't gotten halfway across the room before the glow suddenly disappeared. I was very confused. There was nothing to do but tell Anne that I had made a mistake, then go downstairs to comfort my son. On the way I met Jacques in the hall. His presence terrified me and I jumped back away from him. Then I apologized for being so startled by a friend, told him to calm down and go to bed, and added that nothing was wrong.

I continued into my son's room and embraced him. In a few minutes I was back in bed and the household was again asleep.

The next morning little was said about the incident. I do remember Annie mentioning that Jacques had been bothered by the light the night before. I didn't understand that because their bedroom door had been dosed, so they couldn't have seen the bathroom light, which is left on for our son. I didn't remember my confusion about fire. As far as I was concerned, Annie and Jacques had been disturbed by the light but I hadn't been.

Later that week I found myself a little agitated, without knowing quite why. I had a persistent memory of light flashing in my eyes that night. And I vaguely recalled some sort of an explosion.

The next weekend I had a very clear and dramatic memory of a huge crystal standing on end above the house, a glorious thing .hundreds of feet tall, glowing with unearthly blue light.

I told Anne about it, and as I was talking I experienced a hollow sort of a feeling I knew that she didn't believe me — of course she didn't! And I didn't believe myself. "Wasn't there some problem with the stove?" she asked. I was embarrassed and never mentioned the crystal again. I put it out of my mind permanently.

On February 6, 1986, I came home from Hopkins's house brimming with eagerness. I was sure I would put an end to this by asking careful questions. Jacques and Annie
had
been disturbed by the bathroom light. Of course. Their door must have been opened, as I had seen Jacques in the hall. And my Anne had cried out not because of the explosion but because I had told her the house was on fire. There had been no explosion. And as for the blue light on the living-room ceiling, put some unanticipated light source together with thick fog and anything can happen.

I first asked my wife to think back to October 4. It wasn't hard to identify the specific night, because it was the last time Jacques and Annie had come to the country and the thickness of the fog was unusual.

I was disturbed that Anne at once remembered being awakened by the bang. She did not see the glow, but my initial warning about the fire apparently didn't penetrate her sleep, because all she did recall was my saying that there was no fire.

I asked my son, "Do you remember the last time Jacques and Annie went to the country with us?"

"Yeah. The night of the bang." So he had also heard it. "A bunch of people told me it was OK; you just threw your shoe at a fly."

"What people?"

"Just a bunch of people. People who were around."

This answer, I must admit, shocked me badly. I left off questioning him and called Budd Hopkins, who suggested that I ask my son not about memories but about dreams.

Taking this advice, I next asked my son if he remembered any unusual dreams. This is his reply, spontaneous and immediate:

"I dreamed that a bunch of little doctors took me out on the porch and put me on a cot. I got scared and they started saying 'We won't hurt you' over and over in my head. That is my strangest dream, because it was just like it was real. It happened in the middle of another dream, when I was dreaming that me and Ezra [a friend of his] were in a boat." He could not say if he had had the dream on the night of October 4. He knew only that it had happened at the cabin.

His words swept away all my hopes of solving this problem in anything remotely resembling a conventional manner. What had happened to my little boy? His innocent report was very upsetting. In the context of my own experiences, his dream suggested either that the two of us have some sort of weird psychological link, or that at some point he has had an experience similar to my own.

Next I spoke to Jacques Sandulescu on the phone. This is a transcript of that conversation.

Me: "Do you remember anything about the last time you and Annie came to the country?"

Jacques: "The light! I was sleeping, all of a sudden something woke me up. I saw the room was full of light. Bright, like daylight. Not like the moon. I thought we overslept. I look at my watch, it says four-thirty. Then I hear you through the door, saying it's OK. The light is gone, so I go back to sleep."

Me: "What kind of light was it?"

Jacques: "Light, it was light. I could see the bushes outside. I could see the tree trunks. I thought it was about ten in the morning."

I have done every conceivable thing to try to duplicate light like that. Our guest room has one small window overlooking a seven-feet-deep covered porch. Beyond that the land slopes up gradually, so that not even car lights from the road can enter that room, much less moonlight or sunlight. With the leaves gone during the winter, we determined that the lights from the neighbor's house are also invisible from that window. The movement-sensitive light doesn't shine directly in, but down the porch. Had it somehow turned on — even absent bulbs

— Jacques would have seen not the trees and shrubs but the outline of the porch interior with the yard beyond in darkness. The reason for this is that the fight shines past the window and down the length of .the porch. Had the regular porch light been switched on, the same effect would have resulted.

Even with the neighbor's lights on, the porch light on, and a car in the front yard, we could not duplicate the effect. Nothing I can conceive of can account for the major light phenomena on that night. It may be possible to explain the blue glow I originally saw on the ceiling, but not that massive burst of light from above. I visualized the whole roof being ablaze. Jacques thought it was midmorning. Because of the fog, a helicopter, or indeed any sort of airplane, was out of the question. A pilot told me simply, "Forget aircraft."

At four-thirty the moon was still in the sky, but well below the line of the forest. Could the fog have somehow magnified the moonlight, causing dark-sensitized eyes to mistake its mild glow for bright daylight? Such a thing may have been possible, but the moon was low in the west and the source of the light was clearly directly overhead. And what about the explosion? Maybe it was thunder. But there were no thunderstorms in the area. Perhaps a freak bolt in some sort of unusual ministorm caused it, then. But the period of seeming daylight lasted many seconds, and was not apparent to anybody until
after
the explosion.

Thunder follows lightning, not the other way around.

Whatever caused the effect, it was a highly unusual phenomenon and it is unlikely that it can be identified.

And so far there is no way at all to account for Annie Gottlieb's testimony. I spoke to her immediately after talking to Jacques. While she must have overheard him on the phone, the two of them had no time between statements to discuss the matter. Also, they are normal, coherent, and reliable people. They had, and have, no reason whatsoever to lie and they are most unlikely to be so radically confused by normal realities that they would derive from them memories such as they report. One only has to look into Annie Gottlieb's writings to see the clarity of her mind.

Like the rest of us, Annie was awakened by a loud explosion. She reports: "It was a bang.

Then I heard the scurry of little feet running across your bedroom upstairs. It must have been the cats."

"Annie, the cats were in the city. We don't take them weekends because they don't like the carrier."

"You're kidding! I always just assumed it was the cats. Anyway, I vaguely remember the light. Mostly I remember the noises. A few minutes after the scurrying, I heard you come downstairs. You said through the door not to worry. The next morning you told me that some people had come down from is spaceship to visit."

"
What?
Annie, I never said any such thing. I would
never
say anything like that."

"At the time I thought it must have been some kind of dream."

"You remember me saying it?"

"Well, now that I think of it, I don't know where I got the idea that anybody said that."

(Months later she recalled that I had not spoken about a visit. but had described the crystal. In any case, I certainly had a very strange explanation for the night's disturbances.) At that point I almost wished that I had never asked my witnesses anything. I said good-bye and put the phone down. I realized, finally and inescapably, that something very peculiar was going on. I could not deny it. I would have been a fool to deny it.

I went into my office and closed my door. It was evening, and Manhattan's few blind stars were shining in the sky. The world outside looked so normal, and that moment its very normality seemed to me to be the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

I thought back across the months to October The fall had been an awful time for me and my wife. Around the second week of October I had become extremely fearful about living in the New York area and decided to move.

Had my terror stemmed from that night? And what about all my nervousness, my secret searching under beds and in closets, my unreasonable fear of prowlers? It seemed to me that I had been growing increasingly uneasy with the passing months. I had awful dreams that I cannot remember. Again and again I woke up in the small hours of the morning feeling as if something dreadful had just happened.

The last week of October, still with no conscious memory of that night being in any way unusual, I decided that I couldn't live a moment longer in New York. The city streets seemed hideously dangerous. Our cabin was a dark, terrible place, one that I could not bear ever to enter again. I felt out of control, as if anything could happen, and might.